Twenty Years After
by Kris Ice
Summary: Twenty years ago, he committed an unforgivable crime. Now, a gift of love has given him the courage to go back...


Title: Twenty Years After   
Author: Kris Ice   
Rating: PG-13   
Pairings: SetoxJou,   
Beta: Katbcoll   
Spoilers: None   
Disclaimers: I don't own Yugioh or any of the characters attached to it.   
Summary: Twenty years ago, he committed an unforgivable crime. Now, a gift of love has given him the courage to go back.. 

The sound of the doorbell drew him from his work. He scowled as he stood, but worry ate at his heart. No one came out here this late at night. For that matter, no one came out here at all. That's why he was here. He wanted to be alone on this day and for years past they had always made sure in one way or another that he wasn't. This time he had planned a little more carefully, and had managed to slip away. He walked down the stairs, a chill settling in his veins. He knew who was outside that door, just like he always knew when he was around. It may have been over twenty years, but he still knew. When he opened the door, he almost thought he had been mistaken. The ragged figure on his front steps couldn't be the one he was waiting for, but he raised his head and the taller man found himself drowning in familiar eyes, eyes that had changed as much as his own. 

They stood in silence, comparing the difference twenty years had made. The taller man had grown a little taller and had filled out some. He was still thin and lanky, but he no longer had a starving look to him. He was wearing his hair longer, pulled back into a ponytail and glasses sat on his nose. The shorter one had changed drastically. From what little he could see around the dark trench coat, the other had lost a lot of weight and his hair was cut exceptionally short. He had rough stubble on his cheeks, and new scars decorated pale skin. He appeared to have just recovered from a long illness, or awakened from a long nightmare. 

"We need to talk," the shorter one said, not breaking eye contact. His voice was rougher and a bit deeper than the other was used to, but it was definitely he. "Yes, we do." He moved from the doorway, leading the way to the kitchen. 

He slipped his shoes off at the door and hung his coat on a nearby rack before following the taller man. Part of him grieved when he noticed that nothing had changed since the last time he had been there. It was as if tragedy had frozen time in this place. If not for the man in front of him, he would have thought himself the only thing changed. 

Soon, they were seated at a familiar table, seated in the same chairs they had sat in so long ago. The shorter man almost wept when the other automatically grabbed the wanderer's cup from the cabinet and made him a cup of coffee just how he liked it. They sat in silence, neither knowing what to say. A gulf of twenty years and a lot of pain stood between them. 

"You're a very hard person to find." 

He barely held back a laugh. He even sounded the same. "I didn't want you to find me." 

Sapphire eyes that once burned with pure fire looked down at him, darkened by grief and pain. "So why did you come back now?" 

The blond closed his eyes and released a deep breath before looking up. "It was time." 

He snorted. "You waited twenty years for it to be time to face me." 

"No." He shook his head. "I actually never intended to come back. I left everything behind when I walked out. I worked at missions and homeless shelters for room and board. I did a lot of volunteer work, slept on the streets, but I tried to catch the news whenever I could so I could get a glimpse of you." He fell silent. "I tried to remember everything I'd picked up from detective stories and cop shows about tracking people. I knew if anyone could find me, you would." 

"Then why did you come back?" 

He sighed, looking away. "I did come back before. I came to see him almost every year." 

"So it was you. I thought so. You were the only one who knew." They had started dating on a blind date, neither knowing whom they were to meet. Each came holding two white roses with a red velvet ribbon wrapped around their stems. Almost every year since he died, a set of white roses with their stems bound together with red velvet ribbon was found on his headstone. "No one would believe me. Just like no one wanted to believe what you did." 

The blond flinched at the dark, bitter anger in those words. He had known the other hated him, which was one of the reasons he hadn't planned on coming back, but it still hurt to hear it. 

"They did start believing when I managed to get a partial finger print off the ribbon one year. It matched yours." 

He offered the other a wry smile. "I figured you'd know I was the one leaving them, but I didn't care at the time. I just wanted to pay my respects." 

"Why? You killed him," the brunette lashed out, his voice low and intense. 

"I know." 

Silence fell between them, neither wanting to be the one to open that Pandora's box. 

"Why?" he asked again, hands shaking as he asked the question that had been haunting him for years. 

"He wanted me to." 

The taller man frowned, not understanding. "How could you know? He…he was in a coma." 

He sighed, looking down at his cup. He had known it wouldn't be easy, but he had hoped it wouldn't hurt this much. "He woke up." He didn't look up when the other's chair crashed to the floor as he stood abruptly. "Do you want me to explain?" 

The soft question caught him off guard, and made him feel that the whole situation was surreal. It had always been him with the cool, level head and the other with the raging temper. He picked up his chair and sat down, hands shaking as he took a sip of coffee. He wanted to know, even if every fiber of his being wanted to kill the man across from him, a man his traitorous heart still loved. 

"You know I had been going to see him every day. I'd tell him what you were doing and what was going on in the world. He knew you were busy and couldn't always be there. Hell, we all knew that you just couldn't stand seeing him waste away like that, slowly dying from something you couldn't fight." He fell silent, feeling his own guilt gnaw at him. He look up, seeing the pain in his former lover's eyes and knew he had to go on. "That day, when I sat down to talk to him, he opened his eyes." 

"He'd done that before and wasn't truly aware," the other objected. 

The shorter man nodded. "I know, but this day, he reached out for me. I started crying; thinking he was finally getting better, but he shook his head. He always was more aware of things than kids his age should be. He tried talking, but he had that tube in his mouth. He blinked up at me, his eyes not quite focused. He tugged at his locket and…." The blond fell silent, taking a sip of coffee. It was good coffee, better than anything he had drank in the twenty years he had traveled from place to place. Still, it wasn't enough to distract him from the painful wound in his soul that never healed. 

"He … started crying. He squeezed my hand. His eyes were begging. He let go of his locket and pointed to the cord." He took a shuddering breath, tears sliding down his face. He crumpled, looking old and worn. "I was stunned that he could move at all, but, hell, both of you were always above normal." His hands clenched around his cup and he forced himself to take a swallow to wet his mouth. "He made a pulling motion and looked up at me again." He looked up into stormy blue eyes. "He was suffering, Seto, and he knew you could never let him go. So I had to." He looked down, shivering. "He wanted to go, and I knew you could never make that decision." He swallowed, closing his eyes. "So, I shut off the alarms and unplugged the machines." He sobbed, clutching his cup as his lifeline. "When I pulled that tube out of his mouth, he smiled at me … and … and mouthed 'thank you'." 

They sat in silence. The blond had crossed his arms and was sobbing into them, and Seto wrapped his arms around his chest, silent tears sliding down his cheeks. 

"Why did you run?" 

The smaller man gave a bitter laugh, looking up with a cynical version of his former grin. "I knew you'd kill me for what I'd done." 

Seto frowned. "So, you were worried for your life." 

The blond shook his head. "No, I didn't care what happened to me. In fact, I would have welcomed the relief from the pain." He sighed. "But I know it would have hurt him and you'd never forgive yourself if you did." He looked up, but didn't seem to be seeing anything in the present. "I've had nightmares every night of you finding him, the pain and confusion, the rage and the betrayal." He gave Seto a wry smile. "I would have killed myself long ago if I didn't know he wouldn't forgive me." He sighed and closed his eyes. 

"Four years ago, I found blood on the roses. I had it DNA tested." 

He nodded. "I expected that you would. Sis let you use hers to compare to it, right?" He smirked when he got an affirmative. "I got stabbed by the thorns, but I didn't bother getting new ones. I had seen you on the news not too long before. You looked so… so dead. I thought if I let you know I was alive, revenge against me would help you get your fire back." 

Seto sighed. "I had just… given up. There didn't seem to be anything worth living for. Shizuka's DNA proved that it was possible that the blood was yours, but we couldn't find any way of confirming it. I was so angry when I got back… I destroyed a lot of your things." 

He shrugged. "I figured you would." 

"Why did you come back? There haven't been any roses for three years. I thought those last ones were your way of saying goodbye." The soft desperation in Seto's question made him look up, curious. 

He offered Seto a small, genuine smile. "You might say it was something of a miracle. A little over three years ago, I got really sick. I don't know what it was, but I managed to get to a small free clinic that was run by a convent. The sisters were nice. They took me in and were willing to give me medical help for free." He looked back down at his cup. 

"I almost died. I don't remember much, but my fever was so high, the sisters were afraid I'd have brain damage. The elderly Mother Superior started sitting by my side, treating me the best she could. She said it was only by God's will that I survived. When I was more coherent, she came in and sat by my side. She told me that it wasn't her place to judge me, but if I wanted to talk she was there. It didn't take me long to figure out I must have spilled the whole story while I was delirious. I had been conscious for about a week by time I asked what day it was. Imagine my shock when I found out I had been extremely sick for over a year." He sighed. 

"I started talking to the Mother; I mean really talking to her. I ended up telling her my life story, including a lot of things I haven't told you, but I didn't tell her about that night. She never judged me, never acted any differently towards me. The ladies there became like family, and Mother Clair was like a mother to us all. About three weeks ago, she gave me this." He pulled a braided silver chain from under his shirt. A playing card sized locket was dangling from the end. It looked like a miniature book, with a small silver cross on it. "She just handed this to me and sat down. When I opened it, I thought I was going to lose it." He pressed the cross and the book opened. On the underside of the lid was a pale pink rose with a red ribbon wrapped around it and the verse "and a time to all things under Heaven" written in silver, but it was the other side that caused Seto's breath to catch. It was a picture of two laughing boys on either side of a third whose eyes were rolled upward and an amused smile on his lips. 

Tears slid down Seto's face and his hand shook as he reached out to touch the picture. There frozen in time was his family. He closed his eyes, clenching his fist as he drew it back. "What happened?" he asked his voice rough. 

"I broke down and started to cry. It had been the first time I'd really cried about it. She wrapped her arms around me and let me cry. I told her everything, absolutely everything. She just held me and let me cry. When I was done, I realized I felt better than I had in years. We talked for hours before we started nodding off. Finally, she went off to bed and I started thinking." He sighed. "I did a lot of thinking about everything that happened, and about that verse. I held out the locket in front of me and watched as it spun on the end of its chain. That's when I first noticed the engraving on the back." He flipped the locket over to show his former lover. 

"The greatest miracle is love," Seto read and looked up into warm brown eyes. 

"I still love you, Seto. I never stopped. I did what I did for both of you; even though I knew you probably would never forgive me." 

The brunette reached out and placed a hand on top of the locket he was still holding out in a shaking hand. "I wanted to hate you, and I did for awhile. I realized that you did what I should have done. I covered things up so no one else knows. As far as anyone outside of our friends knows, he died in an unexpected electrical failure." He sighed, looking at their joined hands. "I still love you, and I think I always will, Jou." 

They sat, staring at joined left hands, the locket warmed by their body heat. It felt almost as if nothing had changed even though they knew everything had. Coffee cups with lukewarm coffee sat forgotten in front of them, as they tried to decide what to do next. Jou looked up and found Seto watching him. Their eyes reflected their pain and loneliness. The blond swallowed. "He brought us together with that first blind date; I doubt he'd want to be the reason we fell apart." 

Neither knew who moved first, but they leaned forward over the small kitchen table where they had shared so many good memories. Their lips lightly brushed against each other and they pulled back. "If we do this, I'm never letting you walk away again," Seto rasped, his eyes boring into Jou's. 

The blond gave him a soft smile. "All I've ever wanted was to come home." 

Seto returned his smile. "Then welcome home." They're lips met in a heated kiss, tears sliding down to add a tang of salt to the sweetness of their kiss as they began to relearn each other's taste. Slowly, the first rays of the morning began to filter into the window, shining on a crystal vase holding a pair of white roses, bound together with a red velvet ribbon. 


End file.
